Replayable Execution Optimized for Page Sharing for a Managed Runtime Environment
Kai-Ting Amy Wang, Rayson Ho, Peng Wu · 2019
We present Replayable Execution, a system for improving the efficiency of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) frameworks. It takes advantage of standard kernel features to reduce memory usage and accelerate cold startup speed without changes to the OS kernel, language runtimes, and the surrounding FaaS deployment environment. Replayable Execution exploits the intensive-deflated execution characteristics of the majority of target applications. It uses checkpointing to save an image of an application, allowing this image to be shared across containers and resulting in speedy restoration at service startup. We apply Replayable Execution to a representative FaaS Java framework to create a ReplayableJVM execution, which together with benefits from deterministic execution of a warmed up runtime, offers 2X memory footprint reduction, and over 10X startup time improvement.